Archives for October 3, 2005

I saw the Michael Moore movie Fahrenheit 9/11 when it first came out in Australia as part of an ‘invited audience’ with some other local ABC listeners and a few celebrities.

I found the movie entertaining and amusing but assumed it to be about as historically reliable as that TV series I used to enjoy watching when I was a kid called F-Troop.

It was clear, however, from the discussion that followed the showing, as well as from the ‘ooing and ahhing’ during the movie, that most of the audience was enthralled, enraged and believed what they had just seen to be an historically correct insight into the US led invasion of Iraq… and they loved it.

Others were outraged by Moore’s film with this commentator describing it as: To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of “dissenting” bravery.

I thought of Michael Moore’s film as I started reading Michael Crichton’s book A State of Fear some months later.

Both men, Moore evidently from the left of politics and Crichton from the right, are clearly troubled by the issues of the invasion of Iraq and global warming propaganda, respectively. Both want to communicate their interpretation of events and politics to the general public.

Moore wrote and filmed a polemic which I understand was a huge success at the box office. It was thought the film would influence US politics to the extent that it would result in Bush’s defeat at the last election. It failed on at least this score.

Crichton wrote, and I imagine may one day film, State of Fear as a techno-thriller and criticism of the ‘global warming industry’ including environmental groups and rich philanthropists. Crichton portraits the skeptics as earnest, brave and knowledgeable. I thought the book was a great read. It was entertaining but I never doubted that the hero and skeptic Kenner would triumph so it was not as ‘gripping’ and ‘suspense filled’ a read for me as advertised on the backcover.

I was intrigued by Crichton’s reference to published scientific papers as footnotes to support discussion between his ‘oh so brave’ imaginary character Kenner and the various ‘believers’ that Kenner attempts to convert along the way.

I started checking some of the footnotes, particularly when there was a web address, and was fascinated to see information on NOAA and other sites come up. I thought the technique novel and perhaps the sign of a potential whole new style of writing.

A couple of days ago, a reader of this web-log who sometimes goes by the name of ‘Fletcher Christian’, alerted me to the invitation from the US Senate to Michael Crichton to brief Senators on global warming/climate change issues.

Fletcher and others are apparently outraged that a science fiction writer is being taken seriously by politicians.

Fletcher also emailed me a link to piece by James Hansen (from the Goddard Institute for Space Studies) in which Hansen makes various claims against State of Fear ending with the comment that he can’t understand how Crichton concluded that his prediction in 1988 was in error by 300%.

I reckon what Crichton did is fairly obvious –

On page 245, Crichton’s hero Kenner – who is enroute to LA from the Antarctica where he had, if I remember correctly just foiled the plans of eco-terrorist to blow-up a glacier – explains to the ill-informed Evans how:

“The arrival of global warming was announced dramatically by a prominent climatologist, James Hansen, in 1988. He gave testimony before a joint House and Senate Committee … during a blistering heat wave. It was a setup from the beginning. …”

Kenner goes on to state that Hansen predicted temperatures would increase 0.35 degrees Celsius over the next 10 years but that he got it wrong because the increase was only 0.11 degrees.

I understand from Hansen’s explanation here that Crichton relied on a second hand interpretation of his 1988 testimony that focused on only one of his three predictions – scenario A.

So Crichton took the worst case scenario and wrote it into his ‘techno-thriller’. In the novel, Kenner does not explain in his discussion with Evans that there was a scenario B and scenario C – with the scenario B prediction turning out to be pretty close to the observed.

Crichton was selective. In ignoring scenarios B and C he misrepresented Hansen’s work.

But it beats me why Hanson titled his article ‘Michael Cricthon’s “Scientific Method”‘. Crichton prefaces his book “This is a work of fiction. … However, references to real people, institutions, and organisations that are documented in footnotes are accurate. Footnotes are real.”

Spin, and more spin from the best scientists and best science fiction writers. Who said that the issue was settled?